Naquaii

I won't comment on the AIM-54C thing, you'd have to ask Ironmike for that. The radar slaved to TCS definitely has its uses and if we eventually implement radar relock from that condition it will also be helpful to regain full lock after a lost lock.

Yes, this only works with the radar slaved to the TCS as the radar is needed to guide both. Yes but it does have disadvantages still. If you fire without radar lock the WCS has no range and you don't get full guidance functionality. It is useful still though and will be even more so if we fix the radar lock from slave thing.

Yes, basically this. We need to have an object as a target for the missile so to represent this when a track is lost we do a check when the missile should go active and if the target is still within the limits of the missiles seeker we tell it to go active, otherwise it does not.

The simple answer is that according to our documentation it wasn't possible IRL. It might've been somewhere down the line after the documentation we have but if so we don't know how it worked or how you used it. The only fallback as it is for lost tracks is that the WCS still guide the missile to where it thinks the target is. TWS simply wasn't designed to be used against small maneuverable targets. It was made to counter bigger non-maneuvering targets. That's not to say it doesn't work against other targets but it's not optimal for it. For smaller targets PD-STT should be used.

Basically the mandatory attack is still there, this was a texture bug that will be fixed as soon as possible. The functionality is still there in the same spot even if miss-labeled.

Yes, that's already possible. For the AIM-54 it's basically a pitbul-shot with the difference that the WCS uses the TCS to tell the AIM-54 what direction to go in. After that it's exactly like a normal pitbul shot. For the AIM-7 it uses the same illuminator as the normal AIM-7 engagement but it's pointed in the direction of the TCS. Basically it's kinda like flood but more focused on the TCS track as it uses the normal illumination antenna and not the flood antenna. It's not a silent "sneaky" mode once launched though. The AIM-54 is still active and give a warning as it uses it's seeker and with the AIM-7 the rwr will still see that the AWG-9 is illuminating it for a missile shot.

Currently it supports the AIM-54 by launching it along the TCS line of sight regardless of the radar and the AIM-7 by spot illuminating the target using CW allowing the AIM-7 to be used.

The missing functionality is the ability to still have a radar lock when the radar is slaved to the TCS. Basically either if you switch to radar slaved with an already present lock on the same target with both systems or if you find a target with the TCS and then, in radar slaved, lock it using the HCU. In this case the HCU only controls range/rate and the azimuth is locked to TCS track. This results in a slaved STT that uses radar only for range and/or rate and the TCS for elevation and angles. The advantage of this is that the TCS can then keep the radar on target even if jammed or otherwise unable to lock and as soon as that condition disappears the RIO can quickly relock that target. IRL this also helps against certain jamming techniques that try to fool the radar in respect to angles. This is something we do want to implement but it's further down the line behind stuff like Jamming/ECM effects on the AWG-9 etc.

The short answer is that it all runs in 2 second frames. That's why you're limited to two different scan patterns that take exactly 2 seconds to run. At the conclusion of each 2-second frame the WCS calculates and displays everything, including tracks, prioritys for AIM-54 and antenna steering commands. So basically the AWG-9 performs the scan pattern and then the WCS calculates everything, updates the parameters and then repeat. We model all this including where the antenna is pointing and making sure the radar would actually see a track depending on different factors. Because of this set 2-second timeframe marking tracks as lost is simply a matter of how many frames they've missed.

Ok, so after watching the video and thinking about it my thoughts are that, firstly, we need to differentiate between when you have a TMA (target under missile attack) or not. When you don't (and don't use mandatory attack) there's really not much differentiating the tracks from each other so the WCS will simply steer the scan zone towards the greatest concentration of tracks. This is just how it works, the WCS simply had no algorithms for deciding what was the greatest threat etc, that's a limitation it had afaik. When you do however have a TMA it should afaik never let that go unless there's another TMA on the other side of the scan zone forcing the WCS to choose between them. If you have multiple mandatory attack tracks this can also happen but you'd need at least 2x as many of those as TMAs on the opposite side. Watching the video what I see in the first two cases shouldn't happen afaik so we need to look at that. The third and last case seem to me to be a case of excessive maneuvering, that said it could still also be something else but a roll like that in TWS is ill-advised. In TWS you need to avoid anything but level flight or careful slow maneuvers. We'll discuss this internally and see what we come up with.

Yeah, and if that's actually the case it's wrong, no amount of other tracks should be able to outweight an engaged target ofc so yeah.

I've forwarded this to our radar guy. Just to clarify, the radar should still try to track new non-engaged targets but it should never allow that to affect the targets under missile attack. The WCS assigns each track a weight which determines where the center of gravity of the scan zone will end up and when a track is under missile attack it will recieve a weight that always gives it prio over non-engaged tracks. So the only thing that should make the WCS drop an engaged track is if they split or otherwise end up in situation where it's not physically possible for the scan zone to encompass both. Within those limits it will also try to follow non-engaged tracks if possible. It could be that we need to tighten this up even more or that desync somehow affects this but looking at your video it definitely looks like the WCS allow the non-engaged tracks to affect the scan zone steering too much.

If it does that that's a bug. The radar should never let go of a track with a missile in flight even if only a held track. If you have that happen you should try to reproduce and report it as such.

As i understand it he switched slave mode to slave the radar to the tcs, that will drop you out of TWS. He also says it made the track extrapolated which corresponds to this.

Functionality wise in DCS it can't be implemented as those control radar and weapon channels used which doesn't matter for DCS. Making them clickable is ofc but if they're not already animated it's a lot of modelling work to model the animation and the missing faces for the numbers. But I'm not the one to ask about that.

Thanks! We'll try to reproduce this. It should not be possible to switch from TWS into any form of PD-STT or vice versa and still have the missile guide. If you switch out of PD-STT or out of TWS the missile should be trashed 100%. The issue with no warning on the rwr might indicate something else wrong but this should never happen as it shouldn't be possible to guide the missile like this in the first place. I've added an internal tracker for us for this.

Yeah, as mentioned those switches wouldn't really add much to DCS as it currently is and there's simply no data on the ECCM switches afaik. (Even if DCS modelled enough ECM functionality for those to matter which it doesn't.) And the IR switches were non-functional in the real jet as well as those were for the original IRST.

Not saying he's wrong, I've just never seen any evidence of the AWG-9 or the AIM-54 having a function for actually looking for another radar's frequencies.

If that existed it's not something I've seen evidence of. If you have a decent source I'd like to see it.

I'm talking about home on jam in this case but home on jam could be seen as a subset of home on radiation I guess. We're still talking the missile guiding onto a jamming source emitting on the own radars frequency. It can't look for frequencies it's not using itself as it's not listening to those. So no, not a HARM by any definition.

Yes, that will be possible when we've implemented the effects of jammers on the AWG-9 and the plan is to also implement HoJ when we have that. That said that'll still be limited to what's possible in DCS so unfortunately I don't think it's possible to have an active AIM-54 switch to another target that is jamming other than the initially attacked target like what was described in the Tomcast. (Great episode btw.) It will be more along the lines of the HoJ capability of other missiles in DCS.

The radar can still be locked while slaved to TCS in that the radar calculates range and the TCS keeps it on the target in azimuth and elevation. Honestly can't remember off the top of my head if we've managed to implement locking the radar while slaved to TCS yet, I need to check that. But this is a bit of an edge case as all other cases (including no radar lock even with pd-stt selected) except HoJ would be active shots. If you make a chart I could have a look for sure.

As previously mentioned the AIM-54 is always radar guided in some fashion so there will always be radiated energy that could trigger an RWR. But it also depends on the receiving RWR so we need to narrow this down further like Ironmike says. It could be that the missile is in a blindspot of the RWR or it could be lag or it could be a bug deeper than those we've seen and fixed previously ourselves. What need to be understood about using the AIM-54 slaved to the radar is that it's still mostly the same modes that are being used only that the TCS provides line of sight (angles) for the radar instead of the radar itself. So if you fire with the radar in slaved P-STT it will be an active launch, if you fire with the radar in slaved PD-STT it will be a semi-active shot like normal PD-STT. The only exception is radar slaved to TCS with WCS in standby where the AIM-54 gets pre-launch line of sight information via the umbilical but it is still an active shot.

It is for sure! Rumour has it the Finns even tried swapping them around having both in inventory!

So you're saying an AIM-9B performs about the same as an AIM-9M?